Authentic voices. Remarkable stories. AOL On Originals showcase the passions that make the world a more interesting place.

EMMY NOMINATED SERIES directed by and starring Steve Buscemi is back for a second season!!! Park Bench is a local's take on the special people, places, and spirit of New York City. Through unscripted moments with average New Yorkers and Steve's celeb friends, Buscemi takes viewers on a funny, first-hand journey/misadventure, told in his unique voice.

Journey to the Draft is an organic, unscripted, docu-series that follows three college football players, all with promising professional careers. These young men attend different schools across the country and play a variety of positions on the field, but at the end of the day they share one goal:to play in the NFL. The AOL docu-series follows players Leonard Williams, Kevin White and Marcus Peters.

Connected features the personal stories of six New Yorkers woven together into one of the most intimate series ever. This groundbreaking show changes the nature of storytelling by giving each character a camera to document their lives. The result is a unique format revealing as different as everyone appears to be, we are all universally Connected.

Wake up to your world in 2 minutes.

"Stricly Come Dancing presenter Tess Daly and The Saturdays' Rochelle Humes talk to mums about their experiences of being mum. Whether the daughter of a Rolling Stone, in one of the most famous girl bands the world has ever known, or a parent coping with disability as well as family life, each mother in Being Mum shows that the feelings, challenges and rewards of motherhood are universal no matter the surroundings you find yourself in."

Jews and Money. Asian Drivers. Polish IQ. CPT… that's racist! But where do these stereotypes come from? Comedian Mike Epps explores the backstories of this humor and how history and fact often distorts into a snide – but sometimes funny – shorthand.

"INSPIRED" features celebrities, visionaries and some of the biggest newsmakers of our generation, recounting the stories behind their biggest, life-changing moments of inspiration.

In a compelling series of verite encounters, Win Win provides unique access into the minds and lives of the world’s most-celebrated entrepreneurs and athletes.

Explore what it means to be human as we rush head first into the future through the eyes, creativity, and mind of Tiffany Shlain, acclaimed filmmaker and speaker, founder of The Webby Awards, mother, constant pusher of boundaries and one of Newsweek’s “women shaping the 21st Century.”

Nicole Richie brings her unfiltered sense of humor and unique perspective to life in a new series based on her irreverent twitter feed. The show follows the outspoken celebrity as she shares her perspective on style, parenting, relationships and her journey to adulthood.

Comedy is hard, but teaching comedy to children is hilariously difficult. Kevin Nealon is giving the challenge to some world-famous comedians. As these young minds meet with comedy’s best, get ready to learn some valuable comedy lessons, and to laugh!

James Franco loves movies. He loves watching them, acting in them, directing them, and even writing them. And now, he’s going to take some of his favorite movie scenes from the most famous films of all time, and re-imagine them in ways that only James can.

The story of punk rock singer Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! who came out as a woman in 2012, and other members of the trans community whose experiences are woefully underrepresented and misunderstood in the media.

Here’s the difference between writing monologue jokes and writing fiction. Well, first of all you use the word intern much less and water boarding much less when you write fiction. It’s a different muscle. Writing monologue jokes or writing jokes for a nightly show is a volume business, it’s a volume business, you’re just turning out quantity and then panning for gold. Your using, in the words of the Steroid Universe, you‘re using your quick twitch muscles. You’re just firing quicker and you’re just reacting quicker and it’s all about how many different takes to a premise? That’s writing comedy for television. Now, writing humorous fiction, everything slows down. It’s a different muscle and it’s a state of mind. I think writing jokes is a real physical practice, and it’s all free association, and writing fiction, it’s getting into a state of mind where you’re inhabiting this world of these characters you created. For me, writing fiction, I want to be funny, I want my premises to be funny, I want my situations to be funny, I want my characters to be complicated but, it must be plausible. However chaotic, it must be plausible. The thing about a lot of great monologue jokes is that they are not plausible. They are sort of a little, really? It’s like, we talked about this, people asked me, how did you learn to write fiction? Well I learned to write fiction writing for Dave. Because all of a sudden we’ve had some jokes about Hilary Clinton and Dave would say, let’s just start it with, hey, have you heard? Hilary Clinton’s going to jail. Well she is not, she never was, but he loved that. It was a grabber. You could get a laugh and then he could come down off it and laugh off the joke. That might find its way in somebody else’s novel, but it’s never going to find its way in mine. I’ll give you an example, when Hillary was elected to the Senate and then Bill was out of office, there was a story in the Times that he was a little lonely in Chappaqua. He was sort of rattling around the house so he would go down once a week and have breakfast at a coffee shop in Chappaqua and that’s kind of quaint, it’s kind of charming. Well, that wasn’t good enough for us, we didn’t like that. That wasn’t good comically, so we did jokes for two weeks about him hanging out in singles bar in Chappaqua. We just made up all these, it was great, and we had a ball with it and is it. I guess I’m sort of arguing against myself because it is a little plausible that Clinton might go to a singles bar, but we just made it up and people knew we had made it up and it was very valid as comedy. The best advice I ever got about writing fiction was make your characters lives complicated because, we all have a story in us, it’s our autobiography. I know we think our lives are fascinating. God knows I do, and it may be very well fascinating, but it ain’t complicated. This is my third novel, Everything Hurts, and it is born of real life. This is a book about a guy trying to get rid of a psychosomatic limp and he seeks the aid of a legitimate self-help guru. He’s an accidental self-help guru, and to cure him of his psychosomatic limp he seeks the aid of a legitimate self-help guru. This is born of real life because for three and a half years I dragged a foot. I limped. I was in constant pain, and it confounded doctors. X-rays and MRIs turned up nothing. The pain moved around. There was no consistent symptomatology. It came and went of its own accord. It made no sense to anybody, but I was in constant pain and so I sought the help of guy who specialized in psychosomatic pain. He believes that the pain is caused by unconscious rage driving to your conscious mind and your conscious mind is so threatened by the coming rage that it tries to distract you by giving you pain to a vulnerable area. That’s his theory, I still believe in it, I really do. And so His approach is to examine your past. So, I’ve been seeing him for a little while and I said, you know, what I’m going to do? I’m going to write a novel about a guy trying to get rid of a psychosomatic limp and try to out myself out of this pain. And I started writing it. It took me 2 years to finish. Two years later I’m finished with the book, son of a bitch, and the guy in the book is fine. I’m still dragging a foot and in constant pain. So, I sold the book to Simon and Schuster. Ten days after I sold the book, I went to yet another doctor, took another look at another x-ray and said to me, “You need a hip replacement. I’m not telling you, you should get one. I’m telling you, you have to get one.” This is a no brainer, and so last July I got my hip replaced, I’m out of pain, I feel great, and everybody who suffered along with me said, you must be furious. Three and a half years limping in constant pain. And I say the same thing to all of them, if I haven’t done that I wouldn’t have gotten the book out of it. So, you know, the journey is the destination, right? You have no idea, because as I mentioned, I was in constant pain and one of the few times that I was not in pain was when I was writing and I mean writing at the Letterman Show or working on the fiction, but at the end of the day, I’d come home and relax, put my feet up, with incredible pain that could not be relieved by any pill or anything like that. This book is a reflection of that and I’m sure people have said this before but, Artists create because they have to, not because they need to, and not because they think they should but because they have to. This was a classic case of it, so it was very fulfilling. It was very ambitious because I was suffering while I was writing it, and the guy is getting better, and I was aspiring to the character I was writing about. Boy I’d love to recreate that in my next book. Wouldn’t that be great?

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